About SDmicros

I completely forgot this nugget, but it is only really interesting to me given a long history working with computers thanks to my Mom (she wanted to know how to read the Library of Congress' new card catalog system in 1980 so I got introduced to a TRS-80 that year).

I have sd micros I bought for $29.95 each that are as big as my index finger nail and hold 8 GB of data. There were some with 16 GB, but who wants to be greedy. Look at your index finger nail. Just the nail. And imagine something a little smaller and black with gold connectors and that's 8GB. That holds up to 7 DVDs. That holds all the albums I care about. That goes in my little phone. That knocked me over, and it takes a lot for little technology to knock me over.

The TRS-80 mom bought had no hard drive (just like my phone!) but it couldn't store anything. Loading programs meant playing a tape recording into it's 16K of memory. 16K is 16 kilobytes. The memory in that machine that took up one very large desk was one 64th of a megabyte. And this was an advanced machine mom bought- you usually couldn't find one with more than 4 kilobytes of memory in it. In 1993 I took out a loan, a very large one for my means, to buy a computer that had a 20 MB hard drive. That's 20 Megabytes, 13 years later, storage. The memory was probably 256K, but I don't really recall. For storage though, and that's what we are talking here, that was one 51st of a Gigabyte. And that came in a slow spinning hard drive that liked to get scratched, lose data and die.

Now, by 1998 we were cooking. Solid state devices were out in the form of Newtons, then clios. 40 MB, no moving parts. Even when they got to 80 MB they were 9" by 5" and still one 12th of a Gigabyte. Mid 2000s, the first ipods? Yes, lots and lots of space, but moving parts whizzing around in there a whole 2" by 2". And now I have 8GB in something smaller than my index finger nail in my phone and oh my music sounds so nice. It plays movies by the way. Free software to rip down and rewrite DVDs and next thing you know you are carying libraries of useless things to the UK in your pocket.